A Primer for Teaching World History

A Primer for Teaching World Historyis a guide for teachers who may be designing an introductory-level world history syllabus for the first time, for those who already teach world history and are seeking new ideas or approaches, and for those who train future teachers to prepare any history course with a global or transnational focus. Drawing on her own classroom practices, as well as her career as a historian, Antoinette Burton offers a set of principles to help instructors think about how to design their courses with specific goals in mind, whatever those may be. She encourages teachers to envision the world history syllabus as having an architecture: a fundamental, underlying structure that shapes students’ experiences, offers pathways in and out of “the global,� and reflects the teacher’s convictions about the world and the work of history. Above all, the well-designed syllabus provides students with skills for apprehending the world, past and present-skills adaptable to their broader studies and their lives as twenty-first-century citizens.

Antionette Burton is Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has written and edited many books, including Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism; The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau; Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, and After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, all also published by Duke University Press.